


Cherry Chapstick

by Dragunov



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Drabbles, F/F, Femlock, fem!Moran, fem!Moriarty, genderswapped
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-05
Updated: 2013-01-21
Packaged: 2017-11-11 12:36:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/478618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragunov/pseuds/Dragunov
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sébastienne's been with her since the beginning. It was all flirtation at first, and then there was a phone call.</p><p>For the most part, a series of fem!mormor drabbles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Red Blooded Woman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZaLpZue7us

Her first murder is so stereotypical she cringes to think of it. But then, she supposes, a masterpiece is never the artist's initial doodle. A boyfriend who was a bit too funny; back when she did boyfriends. That was long ago, and far, far away. And she was lucky. She was white, that was Pakistan, and the pater was a powerful man. It's a miracle she remembered to clean her prints of the weapon. Jay dug her case file from the disgustingly insecure computers of a small provincial police agency, and twisted a comical face, black eyeballs flickering back and forth over the pages, “Oh my.” She said. “How _embarrassing_.”

She was lucky because life isn't fair. First murder. And that was her first lesson. Life's not fair.

With every breath, Jay writes a theorem on the unequal fairness of life.

Speaking of firsts.

Black dress, black tights underneath. Jay was just a little girl alone at the bar. And on a scale of one to lucky,  Sébastienne's not sure where that night stands. Now she's leaning across Sébastienne's lap, eyes wide with drug whatever, smearing cherry chapstick on her lips and licking it off again between smiles. Tastes like chemical, Jay says. Which is what she says about anything that's artificially flavored, like the cologne Sébastienne wears. Smells like chemicals, Jay says. Delicious.

Complicated, white, female. Looking for love in all the wrong places. Likes long walks on the beach, pina coladas, chemicals, plastics, the handsoap that foams, bullets, bullet trains and semtex. She's Irish American, maybe American Irish. She dyes her brunette hair black to seem more mysterious. She's happy, and horny, when she can work a baseball bat into her criminal schemes.

It's a game, the closest thing to a calling card she's got. The baseball bat. Because of twentieth century Irish gangs, Jay says, and aren't we oh so Irish, we two. Moriarty and Moran. Contra mundum. Irish girls against the big boys, against England, against the world, against ourselves, against each other, against whomever we please. Sébastienne feels more Iranian than Irish, but she nods, pretends to understand, doesn't particularly care because Jay comes to bed with black thigh high stockings and a  _grin_ .

Sébastienne's been with her since the beginning. Since the tiny flat in Hackney, where she operated a baby drug outfit, back when they could still call Jay a bitch to her face. But she cooked, brewed, cut, grew the best shit. She joked about the kitchen with herself because that's where she spent most her time, and Sébastienne shoved an 9mm into the back of anyone who joked about it to her. The world is full of boyfriends who are a bit too funny.

The black dress at the bar, the Hackney flat, in the beginning it was all flirtation. Sébastienne stayed for the sex. Then there was a mobile call from Jay, directions to an abandoned warehouse, where most of the windows were busted in and the dirty renmants of squatter living lay on the floors.

“I've a surprise for you, sexy,” she said, “come alone,” and Sébastienne thought _like hell_ and _she's decided to murder me_ , then, _sounds almost fun,_ and as she was slipping on her coat, _so this how I die._

She found Jay dressed in a tight grey pantsuit, seated on dangerous looking factory machinary, legs swinging to the beat of her ipod earbuds. She was eating an apple, and when Sébastienne entered, she tossed the core to the floor. Inspired, patient, Sébastienne picked up the core and pocketed it, causing Jay to clap and giggle.

“Goooood girl.” She said.

“Not a night to leave behind DNA, I'm guessing.”

Sébastienne tilted her head, looked at the scene laid out before them.

“No.” Jay grinned, following her gaze. “Surprise!”

Four local drug dealers, a couple from further London, gagged, and bound to wooden chairs. Sturggling, with muffled screams, terrified eyes. Portable ipod speaker and a baseball bat leaning against the wall. Jay hopped down from the machinery, handed Sébastienne the baseball bat, set her ipod in the speakers.

“I'd get on my knees and propose to you, but this is a new suit.” She said.

“S'nice on you.”

“Thank you, I know. Westwood.”

Sébastienne ran her hand along the smooth wood of the baseball bat. Surveyed the men bound before her.

She saw only hightened details. Pit stains, spittle, shivering hands. Jay shuffling to the side as if holding back a dance. And she loved it. And she loved this dark woman like a drug. And she thought, _so this how I die. Sounds fun._ She pulled a gag from the mouth of one of the men, and distantly listened to him calling her bitch, cunt, whore, dyke, carpet muncher.

She smiled.

“We're moving on to bigger, better places, darling.” Jay said, spinning her ipod and selecting a Kylie song. Red Blooded Woman. She turned the volume so high Sébastienne could feel the shitty music through her bones. She felt Jay in her veins. A masterpiece. “I thought we'd throw a going away party. Let's play musical chairs, shall we?”

_My conscience saying, get down off this dream  
It's too dangerous and deadly_

She leveled the baseball bat to the man's head. He screamed for mercy.

Life's not fair.

She swung.

She kisses cherry chapstick from Jay's lips before she can lick it away. 


	2. Chapter 2

Sometimes Sebastienne’ll pretend that they aren’t fucked up. After the army she works in a shop fixing cars and the customers never quite take her as seriously as her male colleagues. When she answers the phone they treat her like the secretary, need second opinions when she offers technical advice. Jay is just a professor at the little local school, teaching business calculus to the last generation of shitbirds, who write vindictive reviews of her on the internet and as far as they’re anonymous Jay knows who they are, fails them all.

Maybe Jay takes her anti-psychotics regularly, maybe behind door number two there’s nothing wrong with her mind and she’s still a sarcastic, back-stabbing bitch, witty and uncomfortably smart for as small as she is to the stars, but no more than the rest of the world, and when Sebastienne dreams it’s of odometers, speedometers, chronometers, not the crunch of bone as she stomps a man’s skull into the sidewalk.

Jay is curled against her, hot, blankets and sheets bundled at the end of the bed, laughing absently in her sleep, as if she can see Sebastienne’s spun fairy tales of alternate dimension domesticity and Sebastienne finishes her cigarette, exhales, is very aware that Jay wouldn’t give a shit about her.

And vice versa.

Her boots, in the hotel bathroom, plastic wrapped, are covered in pieces of blood and brain.

She closes her eyes.


	3. Chapter 3

Jay Moriarty is a child of the atom bomb.

She’s the ruin. She’s the radiation sickness that sets in years after a blast, just as the flowers begin growing again. Just when it seems safe to go outside. She’s star stuff, but the kind that burns men alive, melts the skin from their faces.

“I knew Sagan once.” She says.

She met Sagan briefly before he died. But with Jay there is no passing acquaintance, no nodding acknowledgements, it’s know or not know. She knows the worthy and what’s left are statistics.

She’s in Dallas, Texas, asking about a boat. She ties a headscarf around her short black hair. Sebastienne watches from far away, finger by the trigger.

“He said I had promise. He didn’t understand a word of my dissertation but he said I had _promise_.”

She assassinates an ambassador with alpha particles. His hair falls out. She puts polonium (Po-210) in his tea cup, and his heart fails in a hospital bed almost a month later. The polonium is traced to a power plant in Pakistan and Jay is in an American bar listening to jazz, watching the news, waiting for World War 3 to start at the sound of her snap.

She drinks a red devil.

“Had I been born earlier-”

She’s at a marina in Cuba, two piece black bikini and large brimmed hat to shade her pale skin from harm. It’s hot. She prefers London weather, but she’s here to smile like stupid rich white bitch; to party and spend money poorly. She buys a boat that comes with 700 pounds of cocaine. She makes 28 million.

There’s dancing on an open pavilion beneath the waxing crescent and a soft ocean breeze that tastes like salt. She’s wearing a skinny little red dress that’s slit too high, and Sébastienne’s hand is on her lower back. Her heels tap the cha-cha.

Jay is born at the bay of pigs. Jay is born at every place, at every time, when the plan goes all too right, or all too wrong. 

“Had I been born earlier,” she whispers to the shadows, Sébastienne’s hand still on her lower back, their legs tangled in the blankets, click of a fan overhead, there are bite bruises between them, her naked tights crumpled to the floor, and despite the temperature Jay is shaking, “during the day of Feynman and Oppenheimer and the Manhattan project, I might be in history books by now, might be the _destroyer of worlds_ -”

“And aren’t you?” Sébastienne says, voice deep, too tired for wit, and entirely too believing.

At London Heathrow her heels are sent through a scanner and her sides patted down: she’s pushed through the staff door to a small room and from there to a smaller room and she’s locked away, she waits patiently, seated on a metal folding chair, legs crossed. Two hours later Sébastienne passes through security without a hitch, armed all the way to her false tooth.

She’s intelligence agencies, she’s rogue governments, she’s terror cells. She’s the big bad world. She’s not surprised to discover the British government is run by an old Etonian, white male, rounded vowels and careful, considered consonants that clash with her wild Irish American, American Irish. 

“Polonium.” He looks at her with eyes blue and cold and unblinking, with the unruffled serenity of a nobleman whose most ancient ancestor was also born a nobleman. And she looks back with Nietzsche’s abyss. “How very cold war of you, Miss Moriarty.”

“What can I say? They were stylish times.” She smiles, sharp. She says, sweet: “Though I’ve not the slightest clue what you’re on about.”

“Of course.”

She buys a new pair of boots at the Prada in terminal 5. She boards a plane to Moscow Oblast and sends her old heels on a flight to Atlanta. She finds Sébastienne leaning against a pillar in the hotel foyer. Sébastienne is back at her shoulder in a beat, a step behind. “What took you so long?” 

“Ice on the wings.” Jay says.

She collects tattoos. She decorates their apartment walls with the carefully tanned skin of gangsters, American and Russian and Japanese, all cut in neat rectangles and framed by black. Her favorite is a sunset colored tiger taken from the thigh of a Thai prostitute who saw too much. 

Jay wears a rabbit fur coat and black leather gloves. She caresses the twitching skin of a stripped Russian prisoner, and Sébastienne watches. Sébastienne wears a carving knife. She asks, “Which one?” And Jay points at a Madonna inked into the man’s forearm.

It takes four tattoos for him to finally tell where the stolen surplus weapons are hidden, and Sébastienne marches him through the snow, screaming and sobbing, and she puts a hole in his head. Jay hugs her coat, cranes her neck back to stare at the stars, the blackness surrounding them. She hymns to herself, patch of skin in a plastic bag in her hands, “…holy Mary, mother of God. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our deaths.”

She snaps.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for madammoriarty.tumblr.com

She is in love with a series of bits. Nothing more. Sabrina knows this. She is in love with the emails that vibrate her back pocket; in love with the softly lilting Irish voice that explained, that first morning, long ago, when she found the 50k in her bank account, a mobile phone, a book, and a laptop on the floor outside her flat door,

“the encrpytion is Twofish,” and on the other end, a sharp, shaky breath, as she’d been punched in the stomach and this was painful to say “until I can come up with a better algorithm. But Twofish will do in a pinch, and this is a pinch.”

This means nothing to Sabrina, except that she must turn on a laptop to read her emails, after entering an extended password - a paragraph long passage from an out-of-print manual on tiger hunting, of which only one copy exists, existed, Sabrina burned it. Long ago. The emails tell her where to go, what to do. When to do it. A dead body is waiting in the freezer of a deli down the street from her hotel. She is in Los Angeles. She is to take the body to Manila.

Even decrypted, the emails rarely make sense, but her heart beats fast with each word, if she could, she’d have a hard on by the time she’s finished reading. She’s thinking about the dead body, how she’ll get it past the borders, but she’s not thinking clearly. She’s in love with a series of bits, or, in that Irish brogue, “random variables that are 0 or 1 with equal probability,” and

Sabrina’s not counting, but the moans, screams, whispers, scars seem to say yes and no with equal probability, she’s never sure which it will be. 

The comes body conveniently packed into multiple plastic bags. She buys insulated bio transport coolers, she steals the identity of doctor who does seminars, she’s not comfortable with play-acting, she’d rather be herself with a semi-auto at her hip, not Renee Deneb, MD, FACS. She sucks it up. She’s flying business class, she’s falling asleep to the lull of engine rumbling, when her mobile rings,

“How is this even possible?” She answers.

“Don’t be stupid.” Same voice, American accent. “Seat 17A.”

And the connection is cut.

Row 17 is empty save for a woman with long black hair, eyes black like rifle barrels, bullet wounds, like loss of consciousness, and Sabrina stops, scans her appreciatively, mini skirt, button-down shirt, says, “Excuse me, miss. You seem familiar. Have we met before?” And for a flicker of a second, the space between 1 and 0, the smile seems cruel, then it is so sweet, very sweet, as the woman says, “No?”

Sabrina shakes her head. “I’m sure of it. You’re a medical student, perhaps - UC Davis?”

She sits in seat 17B. She holds out her hand. “Professor Deneb. Renee Deneb. Plastic surgery.”

Black eyes like oil on fire, alight with fake recognition, and bubbling amusement, and the woman shakes her hand, strokes her wrist, “Yes, of course. I took one of your classes the semester before last-“

“Don’t tell me. Miss Doyle, is it?”

“Julieta, please.”

She fingers Julieta from seat 17B beneath a blanket, Julieta nuzzling her shoulder, for all the world asleep, betraying only an occasional hitched breath out of rhythm, muffled innocent sleep noises, and when she awakes, shortly after, Sabrina asks where she’s staying. Same hotel. What a surprise, what could possibly be the probability, and in the hotel bed she fucks Julieta back to Jade, who bites Sabrina’s bottom lip, says, accent thick, “‘You seem familiar, have we met before?’ Hardly your best line, doctor.”

When she wakes, Jade is gone. So is Julieta. The mobile vibrates against a wooden table in the hotel suite, a hack saw noise. An email tells her how to dispense of the body. She lives in Manila for a few days before her mobile buzzes again, and she’s to go to Sweden, she wonders if a Swedish woman she’s never met before is waiting for her there. She wonders if it will be as easy as this time, or if it will take weeks, tactical maneuvers, flowers, flirtation, force. Yes or no. One or zero. She is in love with a series of bits.

“Schrodinger’s fuck.” Sabrina says, when it is Jim, binder invisible beneath immaculate black suit. Jim looks up from his laptop and laughs like shrapnel. 

“That,” he says, “is hardly how Schrodinger’s thought experiment works, but thank you, I can see that was an effort for you to come up with.”


End file.
